Hey Slava, et al.,
I really didn't have much to do with the decision. Our clients have been complaining about the QT install issue for as long as I can remember. Up until a few years back, we could make the argument that the quality and x-plat performance made the QT install worth it. flv changed that - other vendors started making products for our clients using flv, and they were happy with it. So, we had to make the switch.
As for Squeeze and the decisions leading to that choice, I left that up to our video guys (we're a post-production house as well as multimedia, so I get my video directly from the editors who know more about compression issues than I do). I know they tried a couple of encoders before choosing Squeeze, but I can't tell you why they settled on that one - I think it was a consensus decision on their part.
Disadvantages? Haven't come across any other than the ones I mentioned, and as I said, those two are easy to overcome. We needed to build a tool for creating a "cue point track" anyway, so we no longer need an actual chapter track (cues get stored with the rest of the content in xml). As for additional tracks, we just have two movies for the times where we would have used one QT with two audio tracks (different languages). The size of the file could be an issue in that case (and then I'd argue for QT because of that), but it wasn't in the project where I needed that.
Playback... It requires Flash 6.something, which is fine with our clients - they don't have a problem with requiring an upgrade to Flash player 7 on most of our new projects, because the process is so much more user-friendly than shockwave's or QT's. If you're offline, though, you're good to go with just Dir 2004 and the flash asset.
Outside the app, they'll need the latest Flash player, but as I said, that's less of an issue for us than requiring QT.
Did I mention that some of our clients insist on Flash instead of Director, regardless of which tool is better for the job at hand? This is another reason for using flv.
hth, Kurt
On Dec 20, 2004, at 10:12 AM, Slava Paperno wrote:
Kurt,
Like everyone else, I am interested in your experience switching from QT to Flash video. If you don't feel like writing it up for the list, perhaps you could rop a quick informal note to me? I have the same questions that everyone else does: what encoders have you tried? Why did you settle on Sorenson Squeeze? Other than no cuepoints and no additional tracks, do you see disadvantages? Are you sure that your users' systems will always be able to play flv video? What if they want to play it outside your application?
I'm not sending this to the list so as not to put you on the spot incase you don't have the time for a response.
Many thanks,
Slava
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